The German Emperor is ageing me; he is like a battleship with steam up and screws going, but with no rudder, and he will run into something some day and cause a catastrophe.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
My birth neither shook the German Empire nor caused much of an upheaval in the home. It pleased mother, caused father a certain amount of pride and my elder brother the usual fraternal jealousy of a hitherto only son.
During the past few years I have led a sometimes hard battle for German foreign policy.
So in process of four or five years the emperor called me, as divers times he had done before.
But Germany will always suffer, I fear, from the intensely dramatic character of the crimes of the Third Reich.
How dangerous emperors are when they go mad.
Just as a child respects his father even when he perceives his weaknesses and faults, so a German will not despise the old Germany which was once a symbol of greatness to him.
A great war shall burst forth from fishes of steel. Machines of flying fire, lobsters, grasshoppers, mosquitoes. The mass attacks shall be repulsed in the woods, when no child in Germany shall obey any longer.
The German future lies in the hands of our Fuehrer.
When he was twenty-three or twenty-four my father began to learn German and read philosophy in his spare hours, which did not look as though he were destined to remain long on board ship!
Name me an emperor who was ever struck by a cannonball.